Facebook Aesthetics: White World-Making, Digital Imaginary, and “The War on Terror”
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Embargoed until: 5555-01-01
Reason: Version Not Permitted
Pagination
585 - 599
Publisher
DOI
10.4018/978-1-6684-4507-5.ch031
Journal
Research Anthology on Racial Equity, Identity, and Privilege
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What is the relationship between digital imaginaries and whiteness? Following recent calls to investigate the juncture between whiteness and the internet, this chapter seeks to provide a critique of imagery posted on Facebook in the aftermath of 'terror attacks' in Paris 2015. The author renders these images as structured by deep forms of white world-making, ways of thinking and feeling that reproduce whiteness as ethically superior, innocent, and in need of preserving at the cost of non-white knowledges and peoples. In this chapter, the author argues that the internet provides yet another site for whiteness to engage in white world-making by extending the white gaze to digital platforms in the service of transforming the violence of Paris into a racialised attack on white innocence. As such, the Paris images are understood as responding to and perpetuating a digital imaginary in which the political capacities of images relate to an ethics of violence to the non-white Muslim body.